Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Who is the target of Undergeared?

I got several comments, most recently on the LFM tank post questioning the point. The comments say "skill >> gear is already widely known, clearing the content in blues does not prove any new point". The commenters also point out that it's completely pointless to try to prove anything to the M&S, since if they could listen to reason, they wouldn't be M&S on the first place.

On the other hand when I say 95% of the playerbase is useless, people uproar and claim that I'm elitist or plain stupid. This post is to clarify how can the 95% true and Undergeared useful because of each other.

At first the people are absolutely right that 95% are not spellpower hunters, 0/0/71 DKs in frost presence, typhoonFTW moonkins, retards who get more (and do much less) damage than the tank and abuse the healer when they die, 900 DPS rogues, pull-when-healer-OOM guys, or those who try to kill an enemy melee with a WG or SotA catapult. This filth is about 5-10%.

There is another 15-20% who are not destructive, just suck too much to clear anything than an old HC. 1500 DPS guys in T9, healers who spam one spell, tanks who can't hold more than 1 monster, kids who must go AFK often when mum tell them to, lolkids who are not bad players but litter the chat or vent enough to make you turn it off and the "I do whatever I want lol it's my $25" punks who don't belong to any group activity.

That's all together 25-30%. Who are the other 65-70%? Why are they useless? They are socials and they are not useless because of themselves. They are useless because they are unable to get rid of the previously mentioned 25-30%. I mean when it's the second wipe in an old HC because the moonkin typhooned the pack away from the tank, into the other pack and answers "lol" when you tell them it's bad, you will naturally kick him. Or not, because the votekick fails and when you ask in party why, you get "he is just new to the game" or "he just lacks gear" or "don't be mean dude, it's just a game".

Or consider the reason why the guilds, besides the true HC cannot progress (unless Blizzard make them by nerfs or welfare gear). There are some great players in the guild, most of the others are OK, but there are some utter retards who cannot be removed because they are friends or special others or brothers/sisters of someone.

While the social is not useless on his own, the result is the same: wipefest beyond help. You can't fix the retard because he is a retard and you can't kick him because the socials don't let you. While theoretically a group with only rationals and socials could progress, 25-30% is high number enough to always get at least one M&S and if there are socials present you can't do anything about it.

Undergeared is the solution for this problem. While the average socials are not rationals, they are neither complete retards. They are rationalizers. While they make their choices based on emotions, they feel the need to explain it rationally. So after the choice is made, they make up some reason why they made it. However if you prove that it's wrong, they will feel stupid and unless they can make up another reason, they are forced to change. They will still feel bad about their new choice, but they will make it (just like they go to the dentist after all else failed).

The "reason" why they support the M&S is the myth of the casual: "the failplayers are not worse than us, just play less, so they lack the gear and the encounter-knowledge". While we (rationals) know it is nonsense, and most "casuals" play much more than us (it's much more time to get frost badges for a T10 than get it from raid), we can't convince the socials. Their "idea" is emotion-driven, they must believe it or feel bad. So they will not listen to any analysis. They don't want to listen. The only way to prove anything to them is to provide a clear, unquestionable, black-or-white example that cannot be misinterpreted.

Undergeared is such: only blue gear (which is obviously inferior to any gear players have), 1 raid/week (which is obviously not "no-life"), players must have new class, no vent and so on. If we succeed, the socials will have nowhere to retreat, no "reason" to hide their social choice: "be nice with a loser". The project is designed in a way to conspicuously exclude everything they use to say to protect the M&S.

26 comments:

In fact, while playing in casual guild (11/12 ICC25) i can't see the situation you describe here really. It's not that we can kick 20% of our members, get a decent replacement and then go kill, say, Lady Deathwhisper on HC or LK normal next week. Comparing to hc guild (11/12 ICC 25 HC), in which my friend is playing now and which raids i can watch sometimes, it's just that they are simply better players, all of them. It's easy to say 'avoid this and that and dps\heal at the same time', but it's not so easy to do, actually.

Do you honestly think that an sensitive percent of socials (the 50-60% of player base) will actually think when they encounter a bad player:- Well Undergeared did Lich King in blue gear, this full T9 guy should at least do 1500 DPS, lets kick him.

Olga: I'm damn sure that it's always the same people at the bottom of the damage chart and top of the unneccessary damage taken chart.

@Observ: of course not. I think that when a rational says: "Undergeared did LK in blue gear, this full T9 guy should do 1500DPS, let's kick him", they will have hard time pressing no. They want to do the "right" thing, and they can't explain why should the obvious idiot stay. They will still be unhappy for kicking, but they will do it.

No, not really. And the difference between middle and bottom is not so high, maybe not even high enough to distinguish them. I'd say that there are maybe some players that do alot better than others, rather than there are some players that do much worse.Measuring damage done and damage taken isn't relative anyways, cause fights and classes are really different. I play enhance, so i will be in the top 3 on Saurfang or Festergut, while last on Sindragosa (or fail Putricide tries that doesn't include last phase). It doesn't mean that i play worse than mutilate rogue, however. As for damage taken, several classes got pretty nice damage reducing abilities - feral kitty has passive aoe reducing ability, fury warrior has shieldwall, rogue got CoS, warlocks got their teleport, etc. As you may know, we, shammies, got next to nothing :)The only way to determine who's the black sheep here that i can see is to compare logs with other guilds (only works for dps, for healing doesn't), and maybe account various failures and mistakes. I'm not doing this on purpose, but still our situation doesn't look like there are several players with significantly worse performance.

"Noob" is an interesting concept, because it seems to vary depending who is saying it. For many it's more a case of anyone who plays noticeably worse than them is a bad player or "noob".

While if you can't beat content with your current make up, people may consider to be less lenient on underperformers ... they will also consider that it may just take one more attempt to get it anyway.

If they are going to be tough on a guy that realistically is not much worse than them themselves, they will likely feel bad - especially if they can relate to when they were at that level of gameplay.

I had this in my old guild, and I'm glad I left. Whilst I no longer get to raid ICC (due to RL commitments which only allow me to raid later than the start time for most guilds on my server), I don't have to put up with retards.

The problem was as Gevlon mentioned, the social players stopped the retards from being booted. Even when I pointed out that anyone who cannot avoid the Rotface AoE ooze explosion with DBM, an in game emote, and someone on vent telling them to move is a complete and utter moron.

The lack of progress in ICC 25 was always attributed to "people need gear" and "people need practice". This is despite everyone in the guild being in T9, and most of the guild being in T10 from ICC10, and with many attempts on the boss.

The problem was not either of those things, it was that the players were bad and carried off the effort of the few good players. The problem was that most of the guild were lazy and didn't have the brain cells to understand the concept of "run out the fire/ooze/whatever to not die".

Even when a few people saw I was stating the truth, the response was always "we're not a hardcore guild, we're not kicking them". Even when they couldn't dispute what I was saying, they wouldn't boot the morons because that's "hardcore".

Eventually I had enough and left, and no longer waste my time boosting retards.

I'm a little annoyed with some of your posts about pulling dps. I agree that the number of people pulling low dps numbers is a small percentage. The part I disagree with is that if DPS pulls lower dps than the tank that the DPS was the problem. Usually when this happens to me its because the tank has a gs of 6000 mine is only 4600.

The point is that if you are the lowest gs you probably are going to have a hard time doing damage because the mobs will be dead before you can get a spell off. The only time I do a lot of damage is when I'm the best geared in a heroic or we are all the same for gear. The problem with those groups is I have to hold back on damage or we wipe.

I think we put too much emphasis on how much damage you can do. A good player is someone that looks to see if the healer needs help and switches from dps to healing if needed. or an off tank that notices the tank lost agro and grabs the mob so the squishies don't die.

imo when a leader sends you a dps report you know this is going to be a bad run.

"For many it's more a case of anyone who plays noticeably worse than them is a bad player or "noob"."

And why would it be wrong? If I am "noob" myself and someone plays even worse than me, he fully deserves being pointed out as a noob.

What's wrong is blaming others for your own mistakes and not noticing if you play worse than them. If they truly play worse than you, then time for them to improve.

Or for you to change group / guild. Many people do that when they see their "casual raiding guild" wipes a lot on encounters than pugs easily do, they "move on" to "more progressed" guilds or rather guilds who don't tolerate bad players, those who afk in the most stupid moments, stand in the fire and so on.

If raiding Ulduar in blues provides the appropriate level of enjoyment/challenge for you guys, go for it, but I think you are deluding yourself by thinking it will cause bad players to be kicked from guilds.

First of all, people simply do not care much what other people do, and what someone said on some blog isn't really going to make much impact.

Second, even if someone were to take a look more closely at what you did, there isn't really a way to verify that all of your players are casual. They may only raid with you once per week, but they may very well be serious raiders the rest of the time, and no one is going to take it on faith that this is the first time they played that particular class. So the defense that "these guys are HC no-life raiders" will still persist.

Lastly, people are generally not going to care because you are not doing current content. So what if someone can clear Naxx in blues? Naxx was designed to be cleared in blues. ICC is where things are currently at, and if you are not clearing that, you are not going to make an impact on the average player.

"The only time I do a lot of damage is when I'm the best geared in a heroic or we are all the same for gear. The problem with those groups is I have to hold back on damage or we wipe."

Then you are doing it wrong or have bad tanks. Almost every DPS class and spec has some form of agro dump capability. A 4600 gs dps CAN beat a 6k GS tank on the meters. The real problem is the lower geared guy does not know his rotations as well as the 6k and probably does not have everything gemmed, 'chanted, and itemized to perfection.

Yeah in THEORY some helpful dpser that does things like off tank or off heal might be low on the meter... but I have almost never seen that. Most players that are good enough to off heal while dpsing are so good they also are nearly tops on the meter.

It is not just the meter. We use the meter as the example in posts like this, but good players don't JUST use the dps numbers. We look at what the person is doing, we look at the recount logs of their rotations, we notice little things like what presence they are in, we give their gear a glance and look for glaring mistakes. I am not talking about the people that kick you for having SP on a warrior at lvl 69. I am talking about people that tell a DK to get out of the wrong presence at 59. The problem as Gevlon explains it is that most of the people that are fully capable of doing the actual analysis and either offering advice, or kicking, are not doing it. They just live and let live, and then sometimes blog about it later. So a big chunk of those that do check up on people and kick them are either really frustrated uber-raiders that are kick happy, or morons that think they know something but don’t.

You see, in heroics you get a whole class of M&S that CAN do good(ish) dps but are still utterly unwilling or unable to learn and analyze. They think they can and do and they don’t. They are too busy blaming others with misinformation instead of dealing with their plank. These are the ones that get into raids in ‘friendly’ guilds and stand in the fire, or don’t move the spore to the healers or AOE the bloodbeast from the melee. Some of these people might actually shape up and improve if they were given the kicks to the head that a progression guild would give them. But their social guild refuses to.

Personally I think there is hope for them, but social guilds for all their helpfulness are often reluctant to call a spade a spade. If you look a problem in the face you can never solve it.

If you're going to arbitrarily define groups, why not at least define them to support your arguments? If the socials are indeed so social, they won't react to your undergeared project by seeing that 1500 in T9 is bad, they already know that, they're not going to start kicking them. Instead they'll say you're a no-life jerk and go back to wiping.

All you might possibly change are borderline people who are almost sick of playing with bad players, but not quite enough, and a bit of senseless ranting will push them over.

@Will 'If they are going to be tough on a guy that realistically is not much worse than them themselves, they will likely feel bad - especially if they can relate to when they were at that level of gameplay.'

That's exactly what Gevlon's saying. They will most certainly feel bad, because they're socials. But they'll boot him anyway, because he's dragging everyone down. Because they'll finally have to admit, if only privately, that the problem isn't his gear, it's his attitude, or his skill (or lack thereof, rather) that's dragging the group down.

Now, that having been said, I'm not so sure I agree with Gevlon's assertion that these people who won't kick don't because they're 'socials'. I'd consider myself mostly 'social', and i have no problem booting morons, slackers, or even people who are trying but are just not good enough. Even if they're friends of mine or guildies in-game. It's not hard to tell someone 'hey man, you need to up your game. you're just not ready for this.' And a true friend (or a guildie that's really got the good of the group in mind) will understand that.

The real problem with the M&S - what *makes* them M&S in the first place - is their sense of entitlement. We *owe* it to them to carry them through content that even a half-awake trained monkey could do. We *owe* them gear, and a spot in the guild, maybe even an officer's rank. And when they approach you outside the Org auction house and spam '100g plz' while opening a trade window, they expect to get 100g, and snappy. Because we *owe* them, though they've never done a single damned thing to earn any of that.

The needed DPS to clear Naxx was aproximately 2k DPS on each damage dealing class. Heroics come before that, so you're not expected to have to deal more than 2k DPS to clear heroics. If you see people pulling above 1k DPS that is enough for entry level heroics.A well geared tank can generate above 3k DPS these days or more if he/she is able to sustain high AoE on heroics trash mobs and the tank can set the pace of the run. It should be no surprise that some DPS appear very low on damage meters. Think of freshly geared lvl 80's or people below the skill curve.If the DPS is enough, if the healer is enough, if the run is not slowed down to a turtle pace, if no one does stupid mistakes I don't give a rat's ass the DPS is not above individual 2k.I need the great masses of medium players to keep playing and buy my stuff from the AH. (on a side note I also need the M&S that leech on their social friends, like children from their parents, they buy lots of stuff)DON'T ALIENATE THE MEDIUM PLAYER! THE MIDDLE CLASS PEOPLE ARE OUR BEST CLIENTS!

Yep. My guild has only cleared Rotface. All Putricide attempts have ended in abysmal failure. Many weeks, we don't even attempt because "we need to farm the lower spire for gear to get better." This is disregarding the fact that most of our raid is in almost all T10 or T10/T9 sprinkled in. They refuse to not bring along the people who do retarded things. The healers who waste mana and GCDs DPSing. The DPS in 4 piece T10 pulling 3k.

Let's not forget that when we try to recruit good players, some of the officers put up a huge stink since they would lose their raid spot (despite the fact that these are the healers who mysteriously have RL things going on any night we're doing progression).

Them socials are everywhere. It's kind of bad that on my server, there's really nowhere else to advance to unless you faction transfer, so I guess I'll stick around until I see something better.

Hey Gev, I read this article yesterday and thought of you: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-play-farmville

Apparently 73 million play Farmville on facebook - 26 million on a daily basis. The article writer sets out to prove that it's not because Farmville is fun in any capacity, but perceived social obligations make people play because their friends 'need' them to to progress their virtual plots of land.

@Anon #2 - I think you are taking the comments about low DPS to personal. Most people that state that low DPS is being done are not talking about trash in Heroics, they are talking about Heroic bosses, or mobs in raids where everyone should have their fair share of damage done.

For example, I know a Spriest that until she was almost fully T9'd she had a hard time pulling over 2k DPS on a training dummy, my wife finally got dual spec and made it a shadow spec, in her holy gear, with no hit she pulled 3.5k on the training dummy 5 minutes after getting dual spec and without knowing her "rotation" (yes I know Spriests use a priority list not a rotation).

The point is, people who can't push their DPS beyond what people were doing in BC are bad, period. We have to remember the DPS benchmark for Brutalus in Sunwell was around 1800 DPS, at level 70. If people can't do that in T7 they are a failure in my opinion, so obviously if they are not pulling near double that with the stats given on T9, they need to re-evaluate.

Gevlon says: "it's much more time to get frost badges for a T10 than get it from raid"

I disagree and will provide numbers to back up my claim.

To get T10 via frost badges requires 60/95 badges from the vendors. For a player that only gets badges from the daily random dungeon, this represents 30/48 heroics. At 20 minutes per heroic, this is 10/16 hours.

To get T10 via raid drops requires killing the last boss in a wing of ICC 25. At least on my server, pugs are barely capable of killing Saurfang in about three hours. Each Saurfang kill drops approximately 1.5 T10 tokens, so in a 25 person raid this works out to a token for each individual after 17 raids. The expected time to get T10, then, is 51 hours. (Times may vary on other servers.)

Anyhow, the time difference between 10/16 hours and 51 hours is substantial. Gevlon's claim about the time required to get T10 does not hold up to scrutiny, at least when using times from my server.

(Not mentioned, of course, was the T10 gear available from VoA. Roughly one piece drops each time (both 10 and 25), so the gear/time ratio is most favorable there.)

"The needed DPS to clear Naxx was aproximately 2k DPS on each damage dealing class. Heroics come before that, so you're not expected to have to deal more than 2k DPS to clear heroics. If you see people pulling above 1k DPS that is enough for entry level heroics."

If I wanted to 3 man heroics I would just 3 man them.

I prefer having the other 2 dps in the group that are competent since the run takes half as long that way.

"While the average socials are not rationals, they are neither complete retards. They are rationalizers. While they make their choices based on emotions, they feel the need to explain it rationally. So after the choice is made, they make up some reason why they made it."

Wow... this is some contradicting statement. Gevlon, please explain how one can be a rationalizer and not rational at the same time. And while you are on it - what is the difference betewan rationals and rationalizers?

@Andrei: It's simple. The rational wants a "true" answer, while rationalizer wants something that fits to his emotional needs and not irrational.

Obviously "not irrational" and "true" are far away, despite all "true" must not be irrational. Example: "I don't use air travel because it pollutes the atmosphere". Is it irrational? No, since it DOES pollutes the atmoshphere. However it pollutes less than a car does (per passenger, per distance). So travelling by car is worse.

The truth is that the guy afraids (irrational emotion) from flying and rationalize it with green bullshit.

My hope is that this project might help ppl to understand that its skill and not gear that is required as "Gevlon" says. I am really tired of the LFM raid GS and achievement thing. This weeks weekly proved it to me. Malygos can still cause some troubles if ppl dont know what they are doing. I wanted to get the daily done on my alt. First it was hard to find a group because my gs is rather low and I didnt have the achievement. Even though I stated that I did know the tac. I finally found a raid and it was a disaster .. ppl running around like headless chickens and phase 3 .. well I dont want to mention it. after 2 wipes ppl left .. >.< after some time there were this guy spamming LFG channel with "LFM Malygos 10 whisper me tacs for 3rd phase to get an invite. I whispered him the tac and got an invite. It took us 40 min to assemble a raid and not all knew the tacs perfectly but all had a general idea of how to act and move in 3rd phase. So we took malygos down after 1 wipe without any great effort and none of us had a high gs or a skyhigh dps. think average was 2.5 k in that raid. ... it shows to me that knowing what you do is > that dammed gearscore

"I'm damn sure that it's always the same people at the bottom of the damage chart and top of the unneccessary damage taken chart."

Being at the "top" of a chart is meaningless by itself. If you went to an average ICC-25 normal mode guild, the top DPS would probably be far below the bottom DPS in an ICC-25 11/12 HM guild in every possible way, including damage done, fails, etc. Same with the healers and tanks.

ICC raid bosses also drop Frost Emblems so an ICC 10 that can kill six bosses in three hours will get 12 Frost Emblems in addition to all the other good loot from the raid. So you are looking at 15 hours of raiding for a 60 emblem piece of T10.

"Anyhow, the time difference between 10/16 hours and 51 hours is substantial. Gevlon's claim about the time required to get T10 does not hold up to scrutiny, at least when using times from my server."

Except your comparison is apples to oranges.

The T10 tokens off of end bosses in each wing don't award T10 pieces, they upgrade them to the next tier. As a result, they're completely irrelevant to Gevlon's claim. The only place T10 actually drops is in VoA.

The key here is not the tokens, it's how fast you can acquire the Frost emblems used to gather the basic pieces. This is the apples to apples comparison.

My guild, anything but one of the hardcore ones, can still down everything but Sindi/LK on our farm night. This is a four hour raid.

Four hours spent = 37 badges = 9 badges/hour as opposed to the 6 badges/hour farming heroic dailies, not counting the potential five from the weekly ICC quest.

My guild master recently posted in the guild message: "If you do less than 6k dps on any boss fight in ICC, fix it or you will be kicked from the guild." The resultant gkicks and recruits eliminated most of our problems (our healers and tanks have always been strong) and progress continued. We removed almost exactly 20% of our dps. Our raids are now smoother and much more successful.